28 June 2010

Installing NetBeans 6.9 Fails when XCode is Running

I've been trying to install the NetBeans 6.9 official release (netbeans-6.9-ml-java-macosx.dmg) but it kept on failing during the "Preparing Installation" phase.  No detailed errors were shown other than a generic statement to contact my software vendor.

Turned out, at least on my MacBook  Pro, that the cause seemed to be that XCode was running at the same time.  As soon as I quit from XCode and ran the NetBeans installer from the same installation package, it worked without any problems and installed NetBeans successfully.

Don't know if this is isolated to NetBeans or more generally to the installer technology used on the Mac, but it seems that there was some contention with Xcode, which resulted in the installer not working.

 

3 comments:

rc said...

Odd. Maybe NB is redistributing some developer framework that Xcode locks.

If you can remember the time that you were experiencing the problems, it might be revealed in Console.app's All Message log.

Buttso said...

Thanks Robert, I'll take a look at he console log and see what it has to say.

After it failed twice, the first thing I did was to look at what else was running and I made a wild guess that two dev environments may have been colliding.

Lucky guess in the end. Interface Builder was still active so it was just XCode that potentially had something locked.

Sean said...

I found this article to be a very interesting read! Thank you for sharing this with us!